Dead giveaways: Yesterday’s swag is today’s charitable donation

The canvas tote bag was the go-to customer gift for every company and nonprofit for years — judging by the overwhelming number in columnist Caille Millner’s house. How did that happen? Are we finally on the tail end of the trend?

The canvas tote bag was the go-to customer gift for every company and nonprofit for years — judging by the overwhelming number in columnist Caille Millner’s house. How did that happen? Are we finally on the

The canvas tote bag was the go-to customer gift for every company and nonprofit for years — judging by the overwhelming number in columnist Caille Millner’s house. How did that happen? Are we finally on the tail end of the trend?

The canvas tote bag was the go-to customer gift for every company and nonprofit for years — judging by the overwhelming number in columnist Caille Millner’s house. How did that happen? Are we finally on the

Recently, I was seized by the determination to rid my home of all the belongings I no longer needed. I’ve written not once but twice about Marie Kondo’s good-if-guilt-inducing organizational philosophy, so I like to think I’m possessed by this urge often.

Then I swung open a door and was promptly buried by dozens of canvas tote bags. Clearly, the urge isn’t striking me often enough.

Once I’d overcome my embarrassment at having to claw my way out from under a pile of tote bags, I started looking at them.

There was a sturdy specimen from a specialty grocery store in Chicago. There were several from bookstores, publishing houses and museums. Two were printed with hand-drawn maps of San Francisco. A number of the others, mostly from nonprofit organizations, had cutesy designs that I wouldn’t feel comfortable carrying down the street. Others trumpeted now-closed stores, now-disappeared products and brands of which I’d never heard.

Where had all of these bags come from? Why did I have so many of them?

More by Caille Millner

I vaguely remembered paying for a few of them during that moment in 2012 when San Francisco decided to charge a fee for shopping bags. But I certainly hadn’t paid for all of them, which meant some of these organizations had decided I was the kind of potential customer who might be swayed by a canvas tote bag.

How?

“There was definitely a moment when canvas totes were hot, and everyone had them,” Bill Pearce told me. “But that’s also why you’ve got 50 of them in a closet today.”

Pearce is the assistant dean and chief marketing officer for the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley. Before coming to Berkeley, he was a marketing executive at consumer giants like Procter & Gamble and Del Monte.

In other words, Pearce knows every trick in the book when it comes to separating people from their money. And he was not impressed by the kind of swag that was burying me last weekend.

“Most companies don’t think through what would be attractive and useful to their customers,” Pearce said. “They rely on third-party vendors to develop their branded marketing material. Those vendors are just going to use whatever’s hot that season, not think through the type of product would actually help to build a relationship between the company and the customer.”

In other words, it wasn’t an accident that the most elegant tote bags in my full inventory were the ones from bookstores, publishing houses and museums. The canvas tote bag meshes perfectly with both the public and private values of these cultural temples.

Think about it — while a canvas tote is humble in form and supposedly egalitarian in its usage possibilities, it’s genuinely appealing only to the type of person who buys organic vegetables, listens to NPR and wears $200 clogs. In other words, someone who appreciates the ideals of humility and egalitarianism, but has never known poverty and is striving to make sure they never will.

This is the same customer who tends to buy lots of books, go to lots of museums or have enough family money to muscle through ill-paying jobs in publishing. Small wonder those lovingly designed canvas totes are the right fit for those institutions’ customer base. (I’m not a regular NPR listener and couldn’t afford to work in publishing, but I plead guilty on some of the other counts.)

As for the other bags, Pearce wasn’t surprised that I’d forgotten them on the back of the door.

“Swag’s got to tell a story about the company and the service it provides to be effective,” he said. “If you get a beer koozie from a brewery, that makes sense. But who wants one from an office supply store?”

Reader, you can guess what happened next.

After separating the few totes that looked particularly nice or sturdy, I tossed the others in the giveaway bin. For now, at least, I’m in no danger of opening a door and being greeted by an explosion of badly branded canvas.

But there’s a new danger on the clutter horizon.

If the canvas totes were popular with every store, startup and salvation service in the early half of this decade, it seems like the giveaway item of the past two years has been the portable USB charger. As I continued my home clean-out, I collected four of them — all emblazoned with mysterious logos, all of which only barely did the job for which they’re designed.

As I put them aside for charity, I wondered (A) How many I’d collect by 2020? (B) How many of the services they touted would still be around by then? Brands may come and go, but swag is forever.